


Augments and Human Rights

by Cerridwen



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Inspired by a Movie, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-02
Updated: 2015-03-02
Packaged: 2018-03-15 22:19:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3464144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cerridwen/pseuds/Cerridwen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A short meta inspired by the age old debate of Nature versus Nurture in regards to the augments and a look at internationally recognised human and civil rights that are involved with them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Augments and Human Rights

There is a famous quote in canon regard the augments. “Superior ability breeds superior ambition.” This quote has always bothered me. It’s not that I don’t believe that all of the augments were ambitious. They certainly were. It’s just that I see that statement as more of a way for those so-called scientists to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions. Think about it, if you take a bunch of human children and tell them over and over again that they are in fact not human, eventually they will come to believe you. Then you teach them that they are superior to all other forms of life but then you tell them that it is their duty to be the slaves and living weapons of those they have been taught are their inferiors and then you put weapons in their hands . . . honestly what did those morons think was going to happen?!

This is linked to the idea that all of the augments were genetically bred for savagery. Even Khan in Star Trek into Darkness stated that “[Marcus] wanted to exploit my savagery!” This is something I disagree with. I come down quite firmly on the nurture side of the nature vs nurture argument. I believe children learn right and wrong from the adults around them. If the augments were born in the labs as is implied by the original series then all they knew of humanity would have been what the scientists taught them.

On December 16, 1966 the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations. Article 7 of that Covenant states “ _No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. In particular, no one shall be subjected without his free consent to medical or scientific experimentation.”_ and article 8 states _“No one shall be held in slavery; slavery and the slave-trade in all their forms shall be prohibited”._ The Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court (adopted in 1998) also bans forced human experimentation as a war crime. This means that what those scientists were doing was illegal even in their own time. Keep this in mind and then ask yourself this. If a scientist were to run an experiment literally thousands of times what are the odds that he or she would achieve a 100% success rate with every single subject? As Spock would say, “That’s mathematically impossible.” There had to be mistakes. There had to be those augments the scientists deemed failures. Perhaps those who weren’t quite as intelligent as the others or who didn’t heal quite as fast. Or even those who weren’t as aggressive as the others, who didn’t want to fight or kill. When a scientist deems an experiment a failure they don’t keep them around. They take the experiment apart to try and see what went wrong and then they dispose of it. Now some of those mistakes would have been discovered while the augment was still a fetus but not all of them. Some of them had to have been still children when they were written off. Given that what those scientists were doing was illegal even in their own time the odds that those children deemed failures were adopted out is very small. In the balance of probability they were most likely “terminated” and autopsied.

Now consider that all the augments, not just Khan and his people, but all the augments were created to be slaves and living weapons. They were created by the scientists as experiments and most certainly were experimented on. So all the while those scientists were telling the augmented children how superior they were, those same scientists were killing their brothers and sisters that they deemed inferior. They were also conducting experiments on those augmented children and the augments wouldn’t have been allowed the right to refuse. They were also designed to be warriors, soldiers. The tests the scientists used on them would have been geared along those lines. They would have been tested for such things as their ability to withstand pain without relief, to withstand interrogation without breaking, to heal without medication in the field. In short, they were tortured.

What all this is leading up to is that, the same unnamed scientist who gave the quote mentioned at the beginning was himself (or herself) a slaver, a torturer and in the balance of probability, a child-killer.

Nelson Mandela said that “People are not born knowing how to hate.” I agree with this. But neither are people born instinctively knowing how to love. This is one of the meanings of being born in a state of innocence. To have no knowledge or either love or hate. They have to be taught both. I think that most of the augments gave back to the world what the world had given to them. For so many of them it was slavery, torture and slaughter because that was what was done to them in the labs. It was all they knew. But Khan and his people were different. They were certainly tyrants and absolute dictators but they took care of their people well; much along the lines of Queen Elizabeth I in the West and Ieyasu Tokugawa in the East. Both were just rulers of their people and brought about peace and prosperity to lands that had been torn apart by violence, corruption and injustice. Both were equally brutal and harsh about suppressing uprisings and dissent. For those who doubt me I suggest you Google Queen Elizabeth’s policies in Ireland or her response to Catholic revolts in the latter half of her reign and Tokugawa’s Shogunate.

In regards to how Khan was different from the other augment rulers I can only think that someone in Khan’s past had taught him and his brothers and sisters how to love and to value mercy and compassion. I’ve often wondered who that person was and what happened to them.

None of this is me trying to deny that there was savagery and rage in Khan and his people. He’d probably consider anyone who made such a claim to be an inferior imbecile. But I don’t believe that rage comes from anything genetic. I’ve been fortunate to never have been a slave so I can only imagine what it feels like to be regarded as a piece of property and to be completely under the power of another person. The rage and helplessness and humiliation that sense must engender in someone. History is full of bloody slave rebellions driven by these very emotions and many times when the oppressed have risen up they then in turn become oppressors. All things considered it’s extraordinary that Khan and his people showed the restraint that they did.

 

**Sources**

  1. the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights <http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/ccpr.aspx>

  2. The Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court

<http://www.icc-cpi.int/nr/rdonlyres/ea9aeff7-5752-4f84-be94-0a655eb30e16/0/rome_statute_english.pdf>




**Author's Note:**

> You can now follow me on tumblr at http://www.khantoelessar.tumblr.com/


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